Seven police officers in Rochester, New York, involved in the March arrest of a Black man who was pinned to the ground and later died have been suspended, the city’s mayor announced.
“Mr. (Daniel) Prude lost his life in our city. He lost his life because of the actions of our police officers,” Rochester Mayor Lovely Warren said Thursday in a news conference.
The suspensions come a day after attorneys for Prude’s family released police bodycam video that shows officers covering the man’s head with a “spit sock” and holding him on the ground in a prone position before he stopped breathing.
Warren said some of the officers who were suspended appear on the body camera footage and others “had a duty to stop what was happening.” They are being suspended with pay “against the advice of council,” she said.
The mayor told reporters on Thursday that she had been misled by the city’s police chief, who she said led her to believe the man died in police custody of an overdose. She saw the body camera footage for the first time nearly a month ago, Warren said.
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Prude was failed by many officials before and during the March 23 incident, the mayor said. He would have been treated different if he was White, she said.
“Institutional structural racism led to Daniel Prude’s death. I won’t deny it. I stand before it and I call for justice upon it,” Warren said.
Prude’s daughter, Tashyra Prude, is calling for the officers’ firing and wants them to be prosecuted over her father’s death.
“They should be arrested and tried as the killers that they are,” Tashyra Prude told CNN’s Erica Hill on Thursday.
Source:(CNN)
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